


the way you move the earth

by deliciously_devient



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Inspired by Avatar: The Last Airbender, M/M, Post-Recall, crossover? sort of, earthbender!mccree, firebender!genji, firebender!hanzo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:21:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24913786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliciously_devient/pseuds/deliciously_devient
Summary: So, knowing this information, there was only one conclusion he could draw from this.Jesse McCree was the Avatar.****AKA the self indulgent Avatar crossover fanfic absolutely no one asked for.
Relationships: Jesse McCree/Hanzo Shimada
Comments: 10
Kudos: 70





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hey guys! so, this is a bit of a fusion in that it doesn't take place in the avatar continent cannon. I've changed some things so that the Avatars are the same, most of the events are the same, but moved all of the events to have happened in the Overwatch universe. Just a little clarification there.

In a vague way, Hanzo knew McCree was an earthbender. It was in his personnel file, listed next to his height, weight and eye color. 

Bender: E

He knew McCree carried around two small spark rocks to light his cigars with. He'd seen him practicing metal bending with paperclips before, mostly during boring meetings that had dragged into the third hour. So yes, Hanzo knew McCree was a metal bender. 

So when they were cornered by Talon, out of ammo, McCree heavily injured and Hanzo with nothing but the weight of his fire freezing his limbs as he stood in front of his wounded teammate, it was a shock to see him lift a single hand, watch the bodies of the goons after them stiffen and turn their weapons against themselves. It took a moment for Hanzo to process what he was seeing, staring in shock as he looked at the dead talon soldiers. 

Bloodbending. 

The clan had employed one talented waterbender with such a talent; he was often one sent after targets the clan wanted alive, an older fellow with a cruel glint in his eye. Hanzo had had to kill him in the first few months of his split from the clan, but he would never forget the feeling of being a passenger in his own skin. 

His shock wore off in moments when McCree gave a pained groan, and he jumped into action. He slung the injured, half conscious man across his shoulders and made his way to the roof of the building they were in for a quicker pickup. In moments, McCree was in Angela's capable hands, and Hanzo was alone with his thoughts on the flight back to base. 

He knew what he had seen was bloodbending. The way the men had jerked, stiffened, and seemed to struggle as they were directed to kill each other. The hand motions he'd seen McCree use, the gleam in his eyes normally attributed to his Deadeye. 

He also knew that he had seen Jesse earthbend. It was marked in his file. He had been born into an earthbending family, he was proficient at it, and one drunken night he'd even admitted to Hanzo the reason his Deadeye was so accurate is that he bent the metal in his bullets in mid flight. So, knowing this information, there was only one conclusion he could draw from this. 

Jesse McCree was the Avatar.

***

The thought that Jesse was the Avatar consumed Hanzo’s thoughts as they returned to base. Jesse, still heavily injured, was whisked away to the medbay to be tended to. Hanzo had some minor injuries tended to, and found himself searching Avatar Korra’s deathdate and matching it up with Jesse’s birthdate on his personnel file.

They matched perfectly.

Many people had thought, after Avatar Korra’s long reign, that the Avatar cycle had been truly broken with her; and certainly no one had come forth to claim the role. No one credible, at least. He thought about his friend; besides this one instance, he had never seen Jesse use another element in his bending, on the rare occasions he’d even seen Jesse use it.

  
  


He had known the man for three years, partnered with him on missions countless times, and in that time, he remembered seeing Jesse bend maybe five times in total. (He didn’t count the multiple times he’d seen Jesse with his sparkrocks, as that hardly counted.)

He knew Jesse was capable of moving tonnes of metal and steel; the most memorable occasion had been Jesse literally moving an  _ entire building  _ to allow them to reach Hana and Lucio, who had been pinned down after enemy mortar fire. He’d seen Jesse bend wire cables to completely destroy a bridge to cut off an escape route. He also remembered watching Jesse staredown Doomfist, make a quip about the floor being lava, and then  _ turned the floor into lava. _

Now that he really thought about it, almost every time he’d seen Jesse flex his bending skills, it had been using either incredibly easy bending, like with his sparkrocks, or doing fantastic feats of niche bending, such as metalbending or lavabending, or simply moving massive amounts of earth and steel. Even his bored paperclipbending was a feat in and of itself, as evidenced by Reinhardt, a powerful and accomplished bender in his own right, struggling to make the paperclips themselves  _ move _ , let alone dance in the frivolous ways and shapes Jesse could make them flow into.

His thoughts continued to spiral around in this manner, and he found he could not shake them. It was both a huge revelation, and also...not relevant at all. Even as he questioned why Jesse had not revealed to them, at least, if not to the world, that he was the Avatar, he knew the answer in the same thought. He knew Jesse had grown up during the omnic crisis, and much of his early childhood was a constant state off moving from one refugee camp to another, until ultimately he was orphaned and alone before finding solace in Deadlock. He knew Jesse was a man who liked his privacy, and as much as he  _ seemed  _ to be a showboat, he actually didn’t like the limelight at all.

If Jesse had ever revealed his true identity to Overwatch writ large, well...he isn’t sure what might have happened, but he knew Jesse likely would not be the same person he was today, if he was around at all.

Avatar Korra had only lived so long because she had spent a long time in the spirit realm, after all.

Hanzo found he was too tightly wound to sleep, and so he made his way up to his favorite meditation spot atop the cliffs. It was early morning, and he was unsurprised to see his brother already there, in a relaxed lotus position; not meditating then, likely on his phone scrolling memes.

He sat beside Genji, closer than he might have just a few months ago, and leaned against his younger brother’s side with a long, exhausted sigh. Genji was silent for a moment, but wrapped an arm around Hanzo in a loose hug.

“I am glad to see you returned safe,” Genji rumbled, his voice layered with a new reverb that made Hanzo wrinkle his nose. Genji had been allowing Lucio to tinker around with his voice box, and while this one was definitely an improvement over the young girl’s voice Genji had spoken with for over a week, it was still not  _ Genji’s  _ voice and Hanzo didn’t like it.

“Did you know McCree is the Avatar?” Hanzo said, knowing he would not be able to rid himself of his spiralling thoughts until he spoke with someone about it. And, well, McCree was currently in the medbay, likely drugged out of his mind if he was even conscious.

Genji’s sputter was one of utter disbelief, and he pulled away from Hanzo, clicking up his faceplate just to level his brother with the full force of his incredulous stare. “What kind of shit have you been smoking, brother?” he demanded.

“McCree is an earthbender, yes?” Hanzo asked, patiently. He had expected about this level of disbelief from anyone.

“Yes, he is, but he’s not the  _ Avatar, _ ” his brother replied, exasperated.

“I saw him waterbend,” Hanzo said succinctly. That made Genji’s face freeze, his disbelief slowly melting into something slightly less incredulous. “When we were cornered by Talon, and he was badly wounded. We were out of ammo, and ten floors up. He could not have used his earthbending with his injured leg, not for the amount of steel he would have had to move. I had my fire, but I was frozen. We would have been killed, or worse, but he used his uninjured hand to bloodbend those advancing on us long enough to turn their weapons on each other.”

Genji is silent for a long moment, dropping his visor back down. It gives Hanzo a brief pang of guilt, knowing his brother cannot go long without his respirator in the unfiltered air, but he suppresses it. 

“Brother, what is earth?” he asks after a moment, and Hanzo scrunches up his brow in confusion.

“What?” he asks, floored by the sudden topic change.

“What is earth?” Genji repeats. “What is the specific chemical or compound that earthbenders move?”

Hanzo frowns, thinking; he knows waterbenders can bend as small as a single molecule, and so can firebenders, but he doesn’t actually remember what the base component for earthbending was though he must have learned it in grade school.

“I cannot recall,” he admits grudgingly, and he can tell by the tilt of Genji’s head that he is grinning.

“Minerals,” Genji says, a particular hint of glee in his tone. 

“Okay,” Hanzo says slowly, feeling as though Genji has just walked into his childhood room to sing ‘I know something you don’t know!’ and getting increasingly frustrated for it. “I don’t see what this has to do with McCree bloodbending.”

“Brother,” Genji asks, slowly, leadingly. “What are bones made of?”

It hits Hanzo like a brick, all at once, and his eyes widen comically. “No!” he says, shaking his head. “No, there is no way there’s enough calcium in bones to count!”

Genji is  _ definitely  _ grinning at Hanzo, cackling gleefully. “Oh, there  _ absolutely  _ is. McCree is an incredibly powerful earthbender. I was actually around when he invented this style. We had a bloodbender with us in Blackwatch. He was an okay guy but he and McCree did  _ not  _ get along, and he would constantly do things like make McCree dump water on his head, or throw and break his communicator. One day, McCree was watching him do drills with some other members to break out of bloodbending holds, and McCree just goes up, falls into a half earth, half water stance, and  _ bam.  _ He’s working the guy like a puppet, only it’s way jerkier than usual because he’s controlling his  _ bones. _ ”

Hanzo blinks, letting that information sink in, frowning to himself. He thinks over the way the men had moved; jerky, but he couldn’t say if it had been  _ more  _ than usual, but then it had happened pretty fast. But it was just slightly more believable than McCree being the Avatar….except.

“Avatar Korra’s deathdate and McCree’s birthdate match,” he says, as though he is thinking aloud. In truth, he  _ is,  _ because one of his best friends being someone like the Avatar...well, the implications were not good. He’d dumped four gallons of pudding on McCree once.

“So?” Genji says. “Hanzo, millions of people were born that day. It’s likely the Avatar, whoever they are, doesn’t even  _ know  _ they’re the Avatar, if the cycle wasn’t broken altogether.”

“Hmmph,” Hanzo hums, pulling away from Genji and settling into a more traditional seiza. “I suppose you are right. I have seen myself that McCree has mastered every niche earthbending style. I should not be surprised he invented one as well.”

Genji snickers softly as he takes his own more rigid meditation stance. “Just wait until I tell him you thought he was the  _ Avatar _ ,” he giggles, and gets an elbow to the fleshy bit of his abdomen for his troubles.

McCree would probably get a kick out of it, Hanzo thinks as he settles to meditate. It truly was ridiculous, for Hanzo to jump to the conclusion that his best friend was the Avatar; they’d shared with each other some of their darkest secrets, and even though Hanzo still kept one  _ particular  _ secret to himself to preserve their friendship, he was pretty sure McCree would have told him a secret so huge.

Jesse McCree, the Avatar. Ridiculous.


	2. Chapter 2

Jesse McCree was the Avatar.

At least, that’s how he liked to think of himself. Learning other bending styles to incorporate into his own bending was a point of pride for him, and something he’d been doing even before he could put a name to it. 

Born of the desert, he’d first learned to bend sand, like many of his other friends growing up. His mother had been a sandbender, and he remembered learning to sail the dunes on her knee, afternoons spent laughing and giggling. Those were some of his most cherished memories, before the Crisis came to their doorstep. 

Ashe was a firebender, and an aristocrat by birth, classically trained in the art. He learned a lot from her, and from the other firebenders in the gang and how they used their element. Fire and water were the most obvious elements when it came to controlling temperature, but their methods were also applicable to earth, and so he learned how to lavabend with Deadlock. It was that ability itself that drew the eye of Reyes, and led him to being picked up by Blackwatch.

He picked up metalbending in the ‘Watch, just on account of how many metalbenders there were, and soon enough he learned how metalbending and shooting went hand in hand when you had a good eye. Other things came later, like learning to manipulate bones from watching a bloodbender, how to fly with a metal harness by watching airbenders. He was confident enough he could go toe-to-toe with some of the most powerful benders on the planet just as he was, and he was content.

He didn’t like to show people the true extent of his power often, however, because it always led to them just...looking at him differently. Like he was dangerous, like after they’d seen what he could really do they couldn’t trust him anymore, and he couldn’t say he liked the feeling. So he practiced his art mostly alone, and stuck to the basics when others needled him into training. Small things, like messing with paperclips at meetings, and throwing discs back and forth with Rein during training sessions, those were okay.

Occasionally, though, he would have to pull out a battle trick that revealed too much. He brought an entire building down on Doomfist after making a glib comment about the floor being lava, and he’d thought no one had seen, until Hanzo was retelling the story later at dinner. Fortunately, he wasn’t the only lavabender on the team, and everyone seemed to get a hearty laugh out of it. No one looked at him askance, anyway.

This last mission though...he’d been blurry eyed with pain, but he was sure the look on Hanzo’s face was...not good. He was not looking forward to the inevitable questions he was going to face, once he was released from medical, and he was dreading the way Hanzo would look at him now. Every thought he’d ever had about potentially asking Hanzo out on a real date was dashed as he replayed that look in his memory again and again.

He ended up skipping out before he’d been officially released, texting Angela to let her know he couldn’t sit still any longer, and going to his room to get his harness. It was a fine chainmail, covering his chest, groin, arms and legs, made from a gold-titanium alloy he’d snagged from experimental before Overwatch had been disbanded the first time. He fit it over his underthings but under his clothes, and headed out to the cliffs.

The sun was just coming up over the ocean, the soft oranges and pinks of the sunrise just brushing across the landscape. He pulled a cigarillo out of his pocket and lit it with his sparkrocks, taking a deep inhale and letting the smoke curl in his lungs for a moment before exhaling. He approached the cliff’s edge, peering down and letting the vertigo steal his breath away for a moment. This was his favorite part; the anticipation before the first step, the fear that it would be his last.

He thought he heard a shout as he stepped off the cliff, but the wind in his ears snatched it away. He allowed himself a moment of freefall before snapping into attention, using his bending to manipulate the metal and lift himself up.

He twirled in the air, flowing with the metal as he bent it to his will, and took a moment to hover as he made himself level with the cliff he’d just stepped off, facing the sunrise again. He took a moment to take another drag, before snuffing it out on his boot and putting it up. His muscles were beginning to strain keeping the hover, so he began to swoop and soar, twisting and turning for a while before the exhaustion really began to set in.

Hanzo was waiting for him on the cliffs edge when he alighted, his face twisted up in shock.   
“Amazing,” was the first thing out of his mouth before Jesse could say a word. “You truly are a powerful earthbender.”

Embarrassed, Jesse scuffed his boot on the ground, unable to look Hanzo in the eye. “The metal’s doin’ most of the work. I’m just moving it.”

“Do not discount your own achievements,” Hanzo admonishes, lightly. “It takes a true master to do what you did just now.”

There is silence, between them for a moment, before Hanzo suggests breakfast, almost as if he senses Jesse’s need to be anywhere but here in that moment. They walk together to the cafeteria, and any awkwardness Jesse might have feared never arises between them.

The bonebending does not get brought up, not during the debrief or during team stories. When Jesse breaks and asks Hanzo why he said nothing about it, Hanzo replies that he was not sure Jesse wanted anyone else to know of his ability, and so he said nothing.

He falls a little more in love.

If, sometime later, a little decorative cowskull makes its way into Jesse’s room, who only he and Hanzo have the access code to well. That’s just between them, now, isn’t it?


End file.
